Three questions without scientific answers

Although I have spoken about some of these things in other posts, I’ll put together here three questions that, for now, don’t have a scientific answer, and perhaps never will.

• Did the universe begin to exist at the Big Bang, or was there something before? This controversy is much older than many think. Three quarters of a millennium ago, Thomas Aquinas wrote this in his Summa Theologiae (Part I, Question 46):

It cannot be proven by demonstration that the world has not always existed.

In other words, according to Aquinas, the question of creatio originans (that the world had a beginning) cannot be solved by human reason. It should be noted, however, that creatio ex nihilo (the fact that the world was created) would be within the reach of reason. In other words: reason would let us reach the conclusion that the universe was created, but we cannot prove that it had a beginning.

Two errors about human intelligence

Stephen Jay Gould

In a previous post (Information and intelligence) I mentioned that intelligence (the ability to manipulate the available information and create new information) is a concept that is difficult to define, related to difficult terms, such as understanding, reasoning, planning, imagination, creativity, critical thinking and problem solving.

In his book The Mismeasure of Man, Stephen Jay Gould points out two important errors related to the scientific treatment of intelligence:

• Reification, a word descending from the Latin Res, thing: our tendency to convert abstract concepts into entities. In the case of intelligence, we try to turn this unapproachable concept into something more understandable and measurable.

Ten years of Divulciencia-Populscience

Next Monday marks ten years since the creation of my blog Populscience (called Divulciencia in its Spanish version). In this time, I have published 438 articles in both languages, plus another fifteen only in Spanish and eleven only in English.

You may remember that in the post I published one year ago to celebrate the nine years of existence of the blog, I included a figure that seemed to indicate that, after reaching a maximum of about 6,000 visits per month in October 2018, this number slowly decreased until reaching about 3000 visits (one half) in January 2023.

One year later, the figure is this:

Some problems in Automatic Natural Language Generation

Alan Turing

ChatGPT and similar tools have more than met the Turing test, for they are capable of fooling many human beings (I don’t know how many, but certainly more than 30%) into believing that there is a mind behind such simple algorithms. But, quoting Evan Ackerman (Senior Editor of IEEE Spectrum):

The problem with the Turing Test is that it’s not really a test of whether an artificial intelligence program is capable of thinking: it’s a test of whether an AI program can fool a human. And humans are really, really dumb.